Claire Vo: preference

Transcript context

…Amazing. We're going to touch on some of these things you just mentioned actually, but real quick, you mentioned this idea of essentially an energy audit. There's actually a really good guide that I'll point to in the show notes by Matt Mochary that walks you through how to do this. And we talk about this a bunch on this podcast actually, this whole idea of just find things that give you energy, do more of that. Find things that zap you of energy, do less of that. Easier said than done when you have a job and you have to do stuff that people are paying you to do, but it's still really helpful if nothing else to help you point you where you want to be going in your career long-term. Okay, so you mentioned you're a founder, and it feels like you're a founder at heart, but you've been working at larger companies for a while now. And I hear that you're really good at setting a fast pace within larger companies and maintaining that startup focus while also having a very high bar for quality and product. Everybody wants this. Everyone's like, "Yes, move fast, amazing quality." Why would we not want that? I'm curious just what you actually put into practice concretely that allow for you to build teams that move really fast and maintain a high bar. Are there processes you find helpful, values, ways of working? Yeah, it's really funny, people often think that I get hired into the roles that I get hired into in later stage companies because I'm supposed to teach them how to operate like a big company. And in fact, I say I'm hired to remind them they can operate like a startup. And so I think about it completely differently. And there are two things I think about in terms of pace and high bar. From a pace, it's know what your internal pace is, and essentially don't let it degrade to the pace of your recurring meetings. I often find that pace of organization locks to pace of the calendar, and so I am really thoughtful that reoccurring meetings do not drive next steps. It's a very tactical thing, but when somebody says, "Oh, we'll discuss this or we'll decide this in the next meeting," it's, "No, we should discuss this now. We should decide this tomorrow." The other thing that I think about is setting one click faster pace expectations inside an organization. I tend to come in and love this, hate it, it's what I do, which is if I look at an organization that is operating at a lower pace than I would expect, I communicate to my leaders that my expectation is they bring in the clock speed one click faster, which means if you think something needs to be done this year, it needs to be done this half. If you think it needs to be done this half, it needs to be done this quarter. This quarter, this month. This week, today. End of day, in this meeting. And actually setting an expectation that your natural pace is going to be slower than your ambition and being explicit about pulling things in I think can change the way expectations are set and honestly change the energy and momentum in the organization. The third thing on pace is personal SLA. I never want to be a bottleneck for the organization. This is one of the more challenging things about being in my role, is you are often a point of decision-making, tie-breaking, next steps, approvals, socialization. And if my personal SLA is slow, then the rest of my organization cannot be as fast as possible. I try to be fairly responsive. I try to say, "Do both very high rate," and also very quickly. It's really hard, sometimes it's not totally possible, but it's a goal I have. I love this clock speed concept of just let's move one iteration faster than we would normally move. How do you actually do that? Is this just you doing it and then everyone trickles down from the way you're approaching it? Is this a principle on a team? Is there a phrase you use?…

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